Race provocateur extraordinaire Jesse Jackson made famous a slogan in his run for the Presidency in 1988. It was Keep Hope Alive. Thirty years later the American Left has replaced the word hope with another four letter h-word: hate. They hate Republicans, they hate white male conservatives, they hate Trump, they hate the unborn, they hate the American flag, and they hate the police.

The Left sees so much potential in using hate as a political weapon that they have built a hate industrial complex. If they don’t keep hate alive, the bottom of their identity politics strategy collapses.

Enough has been said about the Jussie Smollett incident. The investigation has gone from Smollett being the victim of a hateful homophobic racist attack into what appears to be a hoax. The Chicago Police Department has gone overboard to afford Smollett the benefit of the doubt, and now say that the investigation has taken a new turn. Interpret that to be a sensitive way of saying, we no longer believe his story. Here is some free advice. Whenever you hear about a race-related attack and a noose is in the story, your BS detector should go off.

It appears, and I repeat appears, that Smollett is not a victim, rather a fraud who perpetrated a cruel hoax. If this turns out to be true, Smollett committed a hate crime against three demographics, hitting the trifecta as he simultaneously smeared whites, males, and heterosexuals. If he is found to have filed a false report, he should be aggressively prosecuted.

Smollett going national with this aggravates it even more. For that, there should be a federal hate crime investigation. However, the reality is that, if found to be hoax, he will not be aggressively prosecuted. If he is even charged, he will most likely receive some watered-down prosecution, pay a fine and be allowed to move on—therefore the lack of deterrence encourages others to perpetrate subsequent hoaxes.

Gay and black advocacy groups should be incensed with Smollett, but at this point, they have been silent. Smollett has cast doubt on real claims of gay and black assaults based on skin color and sexual orientation in the future. This is not something to be taken lightly. Smollett knew he had the advantage of his celebrity and platform to stage this hoax. However, he ended up flying a bit too close to the sun.

As they always do, these incidents serve as an opportunity for virtue signaling and moral preening. Ellen DeGeneres jumped in clutching her pearls over the Smollett incident. Maxine Waters, Kamala Harris, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Corey Booker jumped in showing their support for the alleged victim Smollett while shaming the rest of America. The national liberal media learned nothing from the Covington High School incident as they ran full-speed and blindly ahead with reports of the Smollett attack. They drove their predictable narratives while using the Smollett incident as an opportunity to drag President Trump into the discussion and deceitfully chastise every white male conservative for supposedly creating a racist, homophobic environment in America. When will liberal media learn? Probably never—these kinds of stories appeal to their libelous agenda.

Race or sexual orientation attack hoaxes are not new. Recall the Air Force Academy incident in which a racial slur was written outside the room of a black cadet. After the school Superintendent Lt. General Jay Silveria flaunted his racial sensitivity by admonishing and indicting every non-black cadet as racist while yelling at them to get out of the Academy, it was determined that the black cadet wrote the slur himself. Oops. Silveria should have been disciplined for jumping to conclusions and indicting all those cadets before learning the facts. He wasn’t. Many more of these race hoaxes have occurred on college campuses. When it was discovered that the purported victim staged the incident, the media packed up their cameras and microphones and left for the next one. No one from this cabal followed up on the case for the final disposition. We seldom hear what happens to the hoax perpetrator. The liberal media is either too lazy or disinterested to keep the public informed. This allows the prosecutors to sweep cases under the rug with light sentences.

According to the FBI, hate crimes against whites are the fastest growing racial hate crimes in America. Let that sink in. Anti-Black hate crimes decreased in 2016. That is not what we have been led to believe by the agenda-driven liberal media.

No government agency tracks race and sexual-oriented hoaxes. They should. As long as we are monitoring the race of the driver in police traffic stops why not hoaxes? The damage and national uproar it causes makes it worth tracking.

According to a study by American Renaissance “between June 2015 and December 2017, there have been 101 reported what turned out to be hoaxes.” The breakdown is 44 fabricated acts of bias by blacks, 17 hoaxes by Middle Easterners, 13 by non-whites and 10 fabricated assaults against gays. In the case of hate-crime hoaxes, black overrepresentation is much greater. Over the last 2.5 years, on a per capita basis, blacks were 13.3 times more likely than whites to commit hate-crime hoaxes.

Identity politics encourages a cult of perpetual victimhood. Some groups find it therapeutic to be perpetually viewed as persecuted. It shields them from criticism. America has pushed racism and bigotry to the margins of society. We shame it, call it out. Although it exists, it’s on life support. There is no need to fake it.

Sheriff David Clarke Jr. is former Sheriff of Milwaukee Co, Wisconsin, President of AmericasSheriff LLC, Senior Advisor for America First, author of the book Cop Under Fire: Beyond Hashtags of Race Crime and Politics for a Better America. To learn more visit www.americassheriff.com